I think my thought was to have separate segment cursors because of the 255 field limit. There could be, in another application of this functionality, 10 or 15 segments. I would not be able to handle all of them in one cursor (MSH_Field001, MSH_Field002, EVN_Field001, etc) as I would run out of space. I thought that having the cursor in different segments with a unique key tying them together was smart. Then after talking with you, thought that having a driving cursor for the handling of the message-level stuff would allow me to keep up with what message have been processed and just use the segment cursor to process the data through my data dictionary. But, maybe I'm way off...

>Jay,
>
>I guess you could. I don't see any advantage of taking the extra step of putting the segments into cursors first, only to make another pass on the data in cursor form.
>
>But that's just my opinion.
>
>
>>Hmmmm... Ok, so I could grab whatever number of messages there are, put them into memo fields in rows of a cursor to hold current messages, scan through, process each one separately to populate the process tables, clear the message cursor, then start over again with any new messages?
>>